Зеленая миля / The Green Mile

I have a little set speech I make to men new on the block, but I hesitated with Coffey, because he seemed so abnormal, and not just in his size.

When Harry stood back (Coffey had remained motionless during the entire unlocking ceremony, as placid as a Percheron), I looked up at my new charge, tapping on the clipboard with my thumb, and said: “Can you talk, big boy?”

“Yes, sir, boss, I can talk,” he said. His voice was a deep and quiet rumble. It made me think of a freshly tuned tractor engine.

He had no real Southern drawl—he said I, not Ah—but there was a kind of Southern construction to his speech that I noticed later. As if he was from the South, but not of it. He didn’t sound illiterate, but he didn’t sound educated. In his speech as in so many other things, he was a mystery. Mostly it was his eyes that troubled me—a kind of peaceful absence in them, as if he were floating far, far away.

“Your name is John Coffey.”

“Yes, sir, boss, like the drink only not spelled the same way.

”

“So you can spell, can you? Read and write?”

“Just my name, boss,” said he, serenely.

I sighed, then gave him a short version of my set speech. I’d already decided he wasn’t going to be any trouble. In that I was both right and wrong.

“My name is Paul Edgecombe[16 - Paul Edgecombe – Пол Эджкомб],” I said. “I’m the E Block super—the head screw. You want something from me, ask for me by name. If I’m not here, ask this other, man—his name is Harry Terwilliger.

Or you ask for Mr. Stanton or Mr. Howell. Do you understand that?”

Coffey nodded.

“Just don’t expect to get what you want unless we decide it’s what you need—this isn’t a hotel. Still with me?”

He nodded again.

“This is a quiet place, big boy—not like the rest of the prison. It’s just you and Delacroix over there. You won’t work; mostly you’ll just sit. Give you a chance to think things over.

” Too much time for most of them, but I didn’t say that. “Sometimes we play the radio, if all’s in order. You like the radio?”

He nodded, but doubtfully, as if he wasn’t sure what the radio was. I later found out that was true, in a way; Coffey knew things when he encountered them again, but in between he forgot. He knew the characters on Our Gal Sunday, but had only the haziest memory of what they’d been up to the last time.